From the moment on 27 November 1095 that Pope Urban II made the call for the expedition which became known as the First Crusade, anecdotes concerning particular incidents related to the expedition began to circulate among contemporaries. Such stories were perpetuated by both participants and non-participants. Several recent publications have investigated the transmission of these micronarratives in Latin Christendom. In 2014, Carol Sweetenham explored how anecdotes may have originated as spoken tales on the expedition before evolving into written reports which were included in a number of early twelfth-century texts. She noted that short narratives included in written texts were often intended to have exemplary functions, and offered a helpful definition of a crusade anecdote as an instance when, in a text, ‘a particular episode and/or character stands out for a moment against the collectivized heroism of the crusade’. In 2015, the present author published an article which considered the socio-cultural impulses which underpinned how twelfth-century oral traditions on the First Crusade circulated. The aim of the present chapter is to build upon this emergent strand of writing on the transmission of short narratives concerning the First Crusade in the century after its conclusion. To this end, it explores in detail the development of the best known and most widely circulated twelfth-century micronarrative concerning the crusade. The tale concerns Godfrey of Bouillon (c. 1060–1100), a leading participant in the expedition. Various twelfth- century texts relate that during a battle which took place on about 6 March 1098, during the First Crusaders’ siege of the city of Antioch, Godfrey, with a single blow of his sword, cut an armoured Muslim warrior clean in two. It is no coincidence that it was Godfrey who was the focus of this bisection story. In the centuries after his death, he emerged as a totemic cultural paradigm of the crusades. A range of medieval observers cited this anecdote as evidence of his martial ability, and the story came to form a cornerstone of his reputation. The chapter will scrutinize a number of different textual renditions of the feat, and seek to offer an explanation for the micronarrative's evolution over the twelfth century.